


Three By Three

by starkraving



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Fallen | Eliksni, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:01:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23905063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Here is a story. Told time and again: The dead things come three by three.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	Three By Three

The cities of Venus are rotting and a vandal watches her House gut them for the spoils – three servitors set to purpose unraveling the dead locks of ancient dead technology. She crouches, two hands on hips, two arms draped over knees,watching them where they hover, clicking and groaning, around an exposed hub cell at the centre of a warehouse. To her left: a dreg cracks her neck and scratches at the rim of her right docking cap. It’s bothering her. The nerve-weld might be failing. This one is bigger, meaner. She will be un-docked soon and this neither pleases nor displeases the vandal who watches her.

She is a once daughter of the House of Devils and in the House of Exile, there is less disdain between their tiers. 

The servitors seem agitated. Their archon – lanky, missing his right secondary arm, undergrown for his status, standing just barely taller than she – he glances in her direction. The battered bronze of his face-mask dully catches the blue bio-light from his eyes. After a moment, he signals her come forward. She drops from the rail she crouched on, falls seven meters to the floor and unfurls to meet him. He too is from House of Devils, a defector of the archon minors charged with heresy. The three servitors came with him and for this he would be burned alive by the Devil House, flayed to screaming bone.

In House of Exile, however, he is honored as rare priest. When he speaks, his dialect is slightly different than hers, but understandable without a translation program. The arrangement of his sub-vocals catches low, the tertiary chords hooking smoothly into hierarchies of emotion. 

He’s nervous and pretending not to be.

_“Something comes.”_

She tilts her head. “What comes? House of Winter? Have they noticed us?”

_“No. Dead things. The little sparks – the Ghosts haunt the network.”_

“Corpse soldiers?” He is right to be nervous. She signals her dregs to alert. “How far from here, speaker? Where did they patch in?”

_“Not far. They are quick and gone.”_

“Then they are headed here. Have you faced corpse soldiers?”

_“No. Only heard of them. I should go with the great ones.”_

“If they come, they come for you and them. My cadre will hold them.”

_“Will you?”_ He angles his heavy head. “ _There are three.”_

“There are always three, speaker. We need to move before they –”

And this is when the Titan falls through a hole in the ceiling two stories up. She feels it before the strike hits – the sudden drop in air pressure, the violent frisson jarring her at the molecular level and she tackles the archon at the waist, hooking him with two elbows and hurling him clear across the room. She clears the kill-zone at the precise instant the Dead thing drop two-fisted to the floor and ignites the room in ionic fire. Lightening rips blue-white, flash-frying the concrete red hot, blowing out every light in the room and one of the servitors explodes instantly.

The ancient machine mind goes off like a bomb and blows her skidding, slams unto the base of a wall with the archon underneath her. She rises immediately to one knee, emptying her magazine into the burning silhouette standing at the center of the storm. A warning flares in her HUD – three induction rods fried. She hears the whine of battle shanks opening fire, sweeping headlong into the room from all entries, the streak of their shots drill against the corpse soldier’s shields.

The Guardian (that is what they are called in the languages of humanity and its’ subspecies) spins to its feet, sparking and smoking. The lights flicker and in the dark she can see it – where the shell of its golden face shield has shattered and cracked at the crown, venting blue neon fire from inside. Every shot strikes a kinetic blue flare across its body, deflecting them away. The air in the room pressurizes when the dead thing pulls a battle rifle from its back. Her bones vibrate when it opens fire her dregs, bullets tearing stone from the walls.

_“Lieutenant!”_

The archon is still on the floor behind her, the remaining servitors flocked around him, screaming metallic. She tells him to run and he does. 

She sets the stock of her pulse rifle to her shoulder and fires at the Titan. It’s like shooting into a gravity well. The air is thicker where it stands. Tastes like ion through her filters. She’s only ever heard about the burning Titans, the ones so possessed by the power it consumes them. Dying stars in human form. The dead thing is on fire inside its armor and it rips her dregs apart with fistfuls of lightning. It tears them limb from limb as the run in. Crushes skull and pulps bone. 

She lines up the shot. She puts an armor-piercing shot directly into the back of its skull. 

The Guardian goes down.

She doesn’t even hesitate.

She cracks the DNA-shell on a plasma grenade and hurls it at the corpse. She can hear something hissing, an ether tube severed maybe, or something more vital. She pops the heat sink in her rifle and neutralizes the shock core, shucking the spent mag for another as the grenade goes off. The explosion rips the dead thing’s arm from the torso. It does not bleed. She opens fire on the body, hoping to shear it in half, hoping to dismember the flesh, destroy that damn Ghost wherever it’s hiding inside the corpse before it can–

“Ally-oop!”

She barely ducks the blade.

“Shit! Hey, Masa there’s still one in here!” The shimmer of light yells as it attacks her. She ducks again, spins away, a line of hot blue pain ripping her open from hip to shoulder and she staggers. The shimmer flickers and becomes a short, skinny humanoid in a cloak, bones on its shoulder, blood on its boots. It’s been killing before it found her. “Get Nico! I don’t think he killed that archon! It’s getting away!”

The vandal jumps back hissing, every nerve red and pulsing, the knife cut dripping blood. Behind the Hunter a Ghost is winking down at the Titan. Her guts churn. The flicker of molecular reconstruction siphons raw material from the room, knitting the dead thing back together. The Hunter laughs and lunges again. She blocks the thrust with the stock of her weapon the blade glancing right and she cracks the butt of the rifle across the dead thing’s face, knocking it backward, staggering. Cocky corpse soldier. She puts a pulse-rifle shot directly into its belly. It screams.

She fires again into its chest and it goes down, the thin plate of chest armor blown backwards into the mass of bone and blood. It doesn’t bleed properly. For and instant there is red, a hot spray, and then the fluid thickens, coagulates black – instantly rotten in its veins. She turns back to the Titan but she knows without looking, feels the pressure in the room spike as it comes back to life. She turns in time to see the the dead thing shake itself like a dog and rise again on one knee.

She screams, opens fire again on the beast, full auto, unloading the full clip into the monster’s armored chest, ripping through its shields layer by layer. It doesn’t seem worried. It doesn’t go for its weapon. It – it’s looking over her shoulder. 

_There are always three._

The vandal feels her spine dissolve. She lives just long enough to see the purple mist of Void-light as the Warlock she didn’t see rips her apart at the molecular level. It literally puts its fist through her ribcage, clawing through her jerking body like its looking for something inside. The last thing she hears:

“This is what I get for taking Crucible babies into the field.”


End file.
